Gargantua and Pantagruel eBook

fines, and recoveries, penal statutes, crown lands,
and demesne, privy purse, post-offices, offerings,
lordships of manors, and a world of other growths,
for which we want names. Pray, quoth Epistemon,
tell me of what growth is that great one, with all
those little grapelings about it. Oh, oh! returned
Double-fee, that plump one is of the treasury, the
very best growth in the whole country. Whenever
anyone of that growth is squeezed, there is not one
of their worships but gets juice enough of it to soak
his nose six months together. When their worships
were up, Pantagruel desired Double-fee to take us into
that great wine-press, which he readily did.
As soon as we were in, Epistemon, who understood all
sorts of tongues, began to show us many devices on
the press, which was large and fine, and made of the
wood of the cross—­at least Double-fee told
us so. On each part of it were names of everything
in the language of the country. The spindle of
the press was called receipt; the trough, cost and
damages; the hole for the vice-pin, state; the side-boards,
money paid into the office; the great beam, respite
of homage; the branches, radietur; the side-beams,
recuperetur; the fats, ignoramus; the two-handled
basket, the rolls; the treading-place, acquittance;
the dossers, validation; the panniers, authentic decrees;
the pailes, potentials; the funnels, quietus est.

By the Queen of the Chitterlings, quoth Panurge, all
the hieroglyphics of Egypt are mine a—­
to this jargon. Why! here are a parcel of words
full as analogous as chalk and cheese, or a cat and
a cart-wheel! But why, prithee, dear Double-fee,
do they call these worshipful dons of yours ignorant
fellows? Only, said Double-fee, because they
neither are, nor ought to be, clerks, and all must
be ignorant as to what they transact here; nor is
there to be any other reason given, but, The court
hath said it; The court will have it so; The court
has decreed it. Cop’s body, quoth Pantagruel,
they might full as well have called ’em necessity;
for necessity has no law.

From thence, as he was leading us to see a thousand
little puny presses, we spied another paltry bar,
about which sat four are five ignorant waspish churls,
of so testy, fuming a temper, (like an ass with squibs
and crackers tied to its tail,) and so ready to take
pepper in the nose for yea and nay, that a dog would
not have lived with ’em. They were hard
at it with the lees and dregs of the grapes, which
they gripped over and over again, might and main,
with their clenched fists. They were called contractors
in the language of the country. These are the
ugliest, misshapen, grim-looking scrubs, said Friar
John, that ever were beheld, with or without spectacles.
Then we passed by an infinite number of little pimping
wine-presses all full of vintage-mongers, who were
picking, examining, and raking the grapes with some
instruments called bills-of-charge.